The Little Words Mean the Most

I have an audience of

...exactly one. John. My old friend. He's downloaded the free PDF of my WWII action novel, The Unofficial U.S. Army Field Guide to Belfast 1942. But even John is on pause. He's claiming the "heat" excuse. It's too hot to read. It's too hot to grow hair. It's going to be a long, long road to best-sellerdom, I see that now.

It pays to buy fresh

Simone and I buy 99% of our fruits and veggies from a nearby farmer's market, from June through October. I just inventoried some lettuce I bought a week ago. It's still fresh as a daisy. I think one head is still growing, in the refrigerator.

Tummy Pops

The Wall Street Journal calls this fad product "padded panties." Trade name: Booty Pops. They make a non-caboose into a full caboose. Add a curve where a straight line was before.

I have a counter-proposal. Or let's say a line extension. Tummy Pops. T-shirts with padding on the gut. Turns anyone into a 62-year-old guy who's just forgotten his wife's birthday! Happy 105th anniversary, Simone, my love. You are my Pantheon, my only Pantheon. You make me happy when skies are gray. Right now, those skies are showering ball bearings.

On the road tomorrow

Enforcing non-creative activities, I guess. SPJ's blue shoes, the boat stranded in our birdbath, and why do fights always break out when bagpipes are around?

Is success in popular writing...

...nothing more than good transitions? So it seems sometimes.

A full day is

Client work. Today, I am on the widow's walk. And it crushes my heart like ripe tomatoes to tell the tales of two recent widows, hoping to earn donor support for a hospice. But tomatoes make tasty gazpacho, as basically human as food gets. I hope to deeply honor the women who shared their stories with me for these direct mail appeals.

ALSO Today, I go to bat for my case concept (national capital campaign) ... against the first of four dreaded committees of insiders. Imagine: line after line of staff-and-board critics marching toward my best work, their bayonets gleaming and lowered to belly-button's height. Oooh. Ah! Yet! On these same committees are experienced heavyweights! They quickly pick up the sword in my concept's defense! Body parts! Whiplash! The "smartest person in the room" driven back to her lair. Screw committee-dom! Yes, admittedly, some days are more dramatic than others.

Garden work. In front of the front steps, I sit on a boulder of 250-million-year-old volcanic magma dropping, the shape of a giant cookie. Pound my carpenter's hammer into the shards of a terra cotta pot; pulverizing it, to add orange-red dust to the gray gabbro front walk. (I have to ask geologist Terry, Is terra cotta a type of stone?) Gabbro remains admirably weed free. But it's a little desolate looking. Like the grim reaper.

Bonus today: I use a new tool that is as deadly as a hard-swung tomahawk. One end is a savage three-prong fork that no weed can stand against. The other end is a square edge that chops even 1" tree roots handily.

The perfect, all-purpose...

...question to ask proud parents (or disappointed parents, for that matter) to get a conversation started:

"What amazing thing did your kid(s) do last week?"

D Sgusted

The earliest civics lesson I heard was from my father. He sat on his thrown in our tiny GI-bill house and said with undeniable fanality, "All politicians are crooks." End of story.

I was a kid. I didn't realize my father was actually underestimating the scope of the problem.

I lay-a-bed this morning, finishing a paperback titled, The Brothers Bulger. Billy Bulger rose to become the sainted longtime head of the MA state senate and ultimately head of UMass. His brother "Whitey" was credited with more than 50 gangland assassinations. Each ruled their respective roosts: patronage and the vices. Whitey's est. worth at the end was $50 million. Billy receives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year now from the state of Massachusetts in pensions and other emollients.

I gotta tell you, that book fried to a crisp my belief in gov't. To a crisp. Projects balloon to four times their size -- and more -- so "hacks" (the nickname for friends of the family who are hired into cushy state jobs) have a place at the trough.

How do you know you have a beetle infestation? The leaves are full of holes.

How do you know you have a ton of useless hacks taking home a paycheck on the taxpayer's dime? Layer upon layer of bureaucracy. The deepest bureaucracy is the most deeply corrupted. These people are not working; they're drawing paychecks, like bees at the hive.

God! Damn! What I need to read now is a book about reformers who got the job done. As an antacid.

Are u the Nabokov of ur cohort?

Challenge to John. Ken u sing and please improve this song...

One day closer to life

One day closer to death

That's it for today

Which way do we choose

Which way do you choose

Which way for us

And me

A novel in 5 words